The next issue of Cabinet des Fées goes live sometime in January, by mid-month. If you have submitted work and not heard from us, please send a query because at this moment in time, all acceptances and rejections have been sent out but for two latecomers. The choices this time around were difficult to make. So much good work filled up that inbox that I went beyond our recorded response time just to be sure I was making the right decisions. I'm not sure how many reviews we'll have up, but those I do have already are stunners. We are still working on being more active over there, and on getting the Wordpress site to be a friendlier, easier site to navigate and take part in.

To that end, I am very pleased to announce that Nin Harris (merlusyne) has agreed to join us in our quest to make CdF shine. Nin is a "Perplexed phd student trying to wrestle Heideggerian phenomenology and the philosophy of time into postcolonial gothic African diasporic narrative. Also a writer of gothic/mythopoeic fantasy, poet, visual artist, musicmaker and fledgling philosopher." She blogs at Mythopoetica, she recently formed the newly established IRC #mythicfolk and she has an impressive resumé (which I just peeked at over on Facebook). I asked her to come on board to help me with both Wordpress management and with keeping the CdF blog alive. I am ever so glad she agreed.

Because we now run the CdF site on Wordpress, this journal has been and will continue to be mostly silent. I'll leave it up and post to it as I can, but for the real stuff you should pay a visit to Cabinet des Fées itself. Remember to check in during January. We'll see you then!

~ Erzebet

The 7th issue of Scheherezade's Bequest, CdF's biannual online offering of fiction and poetry is now live, with work by Daniel A. Rabuzzi, Helen Ogden, Mari Ness, Shira Lipkin and more. Thanks to the efforts of our reviewers, we have an ever-increasing number of titles on our book reviews page, including fairy tales classics such as Fitcher's Brides by Gregory Frost, Tam Lin by Pamela Dean and Little, Big by John Crowley as well as the more recent Lament by Maggie Stiefvater and A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce, and more. In Our Grim(m)oire, we chat with Mike Allen, editor of Mythic Delirium, as he celebrates the forthcoming and very exciting release of MD's 20th issue, which includes an original poem by celebrated author Neil Gaiman. We'd are also pleased to announce that Donna Quattrone, a regular contributor to CdF and long-time supporter of our efforts, has come on board as assistant editor.

We are currently waiting for the cover art for our third print issue, which has been severely delayed (as usual!). As soon as we receive the art, the issue will be prepped for print and sent off to Prime, who has graciously published CdF since 2006. We will let you know the publication date as soon as we do. Just last month, Charles Tan reviewed our first printed issue, declaring it a weird animal but a refreshing and welcome one, especially when it comes to the content. Mr. Tan, a self-confessed geek, seems to appreciate our mixture of academia and fiction. Grace Andreacchi, one of our contributors, gives us a mention on her blog as well, in an informative post called Away With the Fairies.

This makes it even more difficult to announce that 2009 will see the last "annual" printed edition of Cabinet des Fées.

While we love printed matter with a passion, it has become more important to us — especially in the face of this brave new economy — to support authors in the field of genre fiction. It has always been my hope to increase the amount CdF pays our contributors, and if ever there was a time to do it, that time is now. In order to make this possible, CdF has been officially taken over by Papaveria Press. Beginning with the 8th issue of Scheherezade's Bequest, regular editions of CdF will be online only. We will now be paying $5.00 per poem and $.01 per word for fiction. Please see our updated submission guidelines for more details about this change. We will publish the occasional fairy tale anthology in print, but those submissions will be called for separately. As a result of this change, CdF is going to ask for your help.

There are several things you can do to help CdF thrive. You will now see a paypal button on the site, which you can use to make donations to CdF. All donations received will be used to offset the costs of maintaining the site. You will never see an ad here, nor will we do anything resembling fund drives. Send what you will as you can. Titles reviewed will eventually be linked to Amazon, so if you purchase a copy through the site of something we've reviewed, we'll get a small amount from the Associates Program. You can also help by distributing a copy of our flyer at whatever conventions you attend: download a copy here. We know ink is expensive, so even if you can only print 10 or 20 copies, it will be most appreciated. This latter option is probably the most important to us, since neither Helen nor I can appear at every convention we'd like to.

Last, but not least, by the time our next issue goes live, the entire site will have had an overhaul. We'll be using Wordpress, making it easier for everyone to follow our updates and for us to update the site. We'll keep our LJ as well, and may even create an account on Facebook, since apparently the entire internet-using world is there.

As always, we thank you for your interest in Cabinet des Fées and look forward to many more issues to come, online and — finally — on time.

With love,

Erzebet

I just want to send out a quick congrats to our contributors whose stories received Honourable Mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2008:

Jessica P. Wick, The Cat-skin Coat
R.W. Day, Stranger at the Wedding
Bret Fetzer, The Devil Factory
Mike Allen, The Hiker's Tale

Their stories appeared in the 2007 issue of Cabinet des Fées.

Cabinet des Fées is pleased to present the 6th online issue of Scheherezade's Bequest, with poetry and fiction by Sonya Taaffe, Deborah J. Brannon, Daniel A. Rabuzzi, Virginia Mohlere, Miranda Gaw, Genevieve Valentine and more.

With this issue, we begin offering reviews of an eclectic assortment of books concerning fairy tales and the folk tales informing them. We have also provided a Folkpunk 101 reading list of titles compiled for future review. Mia Nutick provides an insight into how fairy tales continue to merge with other art forms by discussing her own Chimera Fancies, and JoSelle Vanderhooft adds to our collection of reviews with a look at Black Thorn, White Rose, a classic anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling as well as The Neverending Story. In Our Grim(m)oire, I chat with the editors of Goblin Fruit, a quarterly webzine of fantastic poetry now in its third year.

We hope you enjoy this latest offering from Cabinet des Fées.

Claire Massey, the editor of the New Fairy Tales, a new magazine and market, has written in to let us know that she is looking for original fairy tales in short story, flash fiction, poetry or comic strip form as well as illustrations. Their first issue is due out on 29 October, 2008 and the guidelines can be found here.

The magazine will be free to download but she will be asking readers to make a small donation to a local children's hospice to show their appreciation. More information on that can be found here.

x-posted to erzebet

Grace Andreacchi, one of our contributors, has written in to tell us about her new blog. Quite a few of the entries are about fairy tales, myth and related material. There are also links to other goodies, videos and music and a wealth of information about all things literary. She has a very well done blog and I've found her posts so far to be delightful. See for yourself at Amazing Grace: Tell Me A Story.

Remember, if you have anything you'd like to share with us - a blog, a website you've discovered, an event you attended - feel free to write to us at cabinetdesfees [at] gmail [dot] com and we'll give it a mention here.

As of two days ago, the slush inbox was at zero but for two submissions, both of which remain under consideration. Submissions for the sixth online issue of Scheherezade's Bequest (our online edition) will remain open until August 15, at which point I will begin reading for the seventh.

Submissions for the October 2008 print issue of CdF will close on 31 July, 2008. I will resume reading for the 2009 issue on 5 January, 2009. All stories submitted between 31 July and 5 January will be deleted unread.

Please continue to send your poetry and flash fiction for the online edition to me at cabinetdesfees [at] gmail [dot] com. Please do not send submissions to the print edition until next year.

Thank you!

It is a shame I don't read much French, because I would love to comprehend the written content of this delightful book.



With text by P. Jézéquel, J-B. Monge and E. Ferronnière and illustrations by Erlé Ferronnière and Jean-Baptiste Monge, the latter on whose blog we found this (along with many other wonderful things).

Daniel Rabuzzi, whose poem Four and Twenty will appear in the forthcoming issue of Scheherezade's Bequest, has written in about an evening with Maria Tatar. I asked him if he would share his experience with readers of the CdF blog, and Daniel kindly agreed. Here is what he had to say:

Last week in Manhattan I had the chance to hear Maria Tatar speak about fairytales, literature for children, and how children learn to read.

Tatar is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard, and probably known to many CdF readers as editor and translator of The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales [Norton, 2002], and author of The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales [Princeton University Press, 2003].

Tatar’s main points were that children read very differently from adults, that we adults are not quite sure of the “how’s” and “why’s” yet, that many of us as adults will seek to re-create the passionate, intense (and intensive) nature of childhood reading, and that abiding interest in fairytales may be one expression for that adult yearning.

She referenced recent advances in the neurosciences and cognitive psychology to make her points about the unique ways in which children read. As she points out, reading is an unnatural activity that our hominid brain is still adapting to - reading itself reorganizes elements of the brain’s architecture. Tatar cited Child Development Professor Maryanne Wolf's ground-breaking work at the Tufts Center for Reading and Language Research - see Wolf’s book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain [Harper Collins, 2007].

Tatar demonstrated several of her points by reading snippets from modern children’s literature - she quoted and cited extensively from Pullman’s The Golden Compass.

In all, an intriguing look at the evergreen potency of fairytales, seen in the context of modern reading theory and advances in the neurosciences.

With best regards,

Daniel A. Rabuzzi

Readers of and contributors to CdF are welcome to alert us to any fairy tale related activities in their neighborhood, or to anything interesting they might find online. Please contact me at e [dot] yellowboy [at] gmail [dot] com if you have something you'd like to share with readers of the blog.

By way of 7sevan who came across the link on ralan.com, I've been introduced to a new market for fairy tale fiction, related non-fiction and art. Or so it appears. With a website here and a blog there and a facebook somewhere else and even a mailing list, it should be easy to follow the breadcrumbs to the submission guidelines. It would seem their first issue is due out in June. I've become a fan on facebook and subscribed to the mailing list. I'll be interested to see what they've got to offer when the first issue does go live.

x-posted to erzebet